Diversity is our greatest asset

The face of America is changing. More than half of all babies in the United States are now of color. By the end of this decade, most youth will be too. Within three decades, more than half of all Americans will be people of color.

But even as our country grows more diverse, inequity for people of color continues to grow. The Great Recession caused a huge and disproportionate drop in wealth for people of color. Black family wealth fell 31 percent; Latino family wealth dropped 44 percent, while white families lost only 11 percent of their wealth. As a result, families of color went from having a quarter of the wealth of white families to just one-sixth.

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These opposing trends — increasing inequity in the midst of rapid demographic changes across the country — require us to reassess our priorities and acknowledge that the future prosperity of the United States depends on embracing our nation’s diversity today. Our chasms are deep. But if we address these gaps, we can grow more robustly.

There are lessons in our past that show the benefits of greater inclusion. Up to 20 percent of U.S. economic growth from 1960 to 2008 resulted from the integration of women and people of color into professional jobs, according to a 2012 Stanford study. Closing the racial achievement gap in education during the 1980s and 1990s would have boosted U.S. gross domestic product by roughly 2 percent to 4 percent, according to a 2009 McKinsey study, and the economic impact of closing the gap will grow larger going forward. A new analysis by Center for American Progress economist Robert Lynch demonstrates that eliminating the income gap between racial and ethnic groups would increase annual U.S. GDP by at least $1.2 trillion and raise nearly $200 billion in new tax revenues every year.

Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers lays out the implications of these numbers in the new book “All-In Nation: An America that Works for All”: “As people of color become a majority of the population, the failure to end their economic exclusion means the failure of the American economy.” If America is to continue to be a land of opportunity and prosperity, we simply can’t afford to leave half the country behind. “All-In Nation” provides a blueprint for how to shift the existing dynamic, starting with acknowledging the role race plays in our society so that we can address the disparities and truly embrace the underlying belief we all share as Americans — “that every person should have the opportunity to succeed in life and that success should depend on one’s talent and hard work, not on being born rich or poor,” as Summers puts it.

As two women of color, we have no illusions about the magnitude of the challenges facing us, our children and our grandchildren. Troubling trends, from rising inequality to stagnating mobility, threaten to further entrench long-standing racial inequities.

But we are also hopeful about the opportunities we see before us. As more and more evidence points to a strong middle class as a critical driver of economic growth, it’s clear that supporting communities of color to succeed will pay dividends across the entire economy. And the more we learn about how innovation emerges from the mixing of different ideas, cultures and attitudes, the more we realize that America’s diversity is an extraordinary asset in our increasingly competitive global economy. If we can harness this diversity by investing in all our people, we’re certain that America can live up to its promise as not only an economic powerhouse but also as the world’s beacon of opportunity for all.

Neera Tanden is president of the Center for American Progress. Angela Glover Blackwell is founder and CEO of PolicyLink.